(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
South Korean, German-based Byung Chul-Han is out with two books in English this spring. In the Swarm is a fairly predictable technology criticism, albeit with some gold grain (see review in this newspaper); the other, Agony of Eros, is a philosophical analysis of love. Or er it really that?
As I read the book, it is rather a reflection on how love – or an idealized aspect of the love experience – can be used as a medium to resist the alienation of late modernity or the "inferno of the same", as Chul-Han cleverly puts it.
Embodied love. Again, this is an area of experience threatened by capitalism. Today, love has become a wish list where we tick off what we want. A partner thus becomes a confirmation of what we already want – who we already are, says Chul-Han. A bit like the settings on Amazon, which show recommendations based on what you bought before – or Google, where the search results reflect what you searched for and clicked on beforehand.
We live in a culture of performance where the otherness, the foreign and the unknown, the things we do not master, on all bows and edges are replaced by body and spirit as something to sell or perform. Therefore, we must also live up to what others want – yes, perform and sell ourselves to potential partners, says Chul-Han. Love reduced to sales pitches sounds, quite rightly, not very romantic.
"A successful relationship with the Other is best expressed as a form of failure or failure."
Then it is no wonder that sex has also become an achievement, a power effort that shows what we are can, says Chul-Han. Such performance-driven bedbugs are at the expense of the true sensuality of people, ie the erotic, or Eros, as the South Korean philosopher calls it.
"Eros is another relationship the other that is beyond performance, performance and capabilities, ”he says. "A successful relationship with the Other is best expressed as a form of failure or failure. "
Here, Chul-Han is eccentric, but in on something interesting. The object of love in this essay is not the other human being, but a quantity he calls "the atopic Other". By this he presumably means that true love, the authentic eroticism, is always something other than what we can prepare, calculate for or plan. The Other is always something more than we think, and in this sense is also always a riddle and a source of something inexhaustible, not quantifiable. Moreover, the other is not identifiable in terms of having any particular affiliation or characteristic, and is thus "without place", a-moles.
Through a partner, this dimension of otherness can thus be expressed as an experience dimension where we, as the philosopher Alain Badiou writes in the book's preface, can no longer be reduced to our own perspective and its limitations, but per se have expanded our own identity to a duality. .
In parallel with sex as the realization of the erotic, information is the opposite of knowledge.
Sexuality and information. This may sound foggy, but Chul-Han is charming in his utopian reflections on love as a means of reviving "fragmented entrepreneurial souls" and late modern soul life stuck in performance anxiety. Especially when he raises his gaze and sees the Other as associated with alternative aspects of life that cannot be measured and controlled, without us losing touch with what love is. In parallel with sex as the realization of the erotic, where performance and consumption of bodies define the situation, information is the opposite of knowledge. It does not help how many bytes of information we have access to if it can not be converted into a knowledge with room for what we do not know, ie a form of thinking wonder.
In the last chapter, Chul-Han refers to an article by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, who claims that with all the tools for comparing and filtering information that is eventually available on the web, we no longer need theory to find out how things work. together. "All we need is data," says Anderson.
Chul-Han is of course not on the notes, for such a collection of quantification-based, comparative algorithms "would put an end to theory of the empathic kind. It is additive og detecting – not narrative and hermeneutical. "
Chul-Han is sympathetic in his worship of the enigmatic and what we cannot plan as a necessary part of human love and thought life. He is also inventive and a fresh reader of popular culture, not unlike Slavoj Zizek. Both use, for example, Lars von Triers Melancholia as a tool of thought. Chul-Han is the most original in his review of this film, because according to him it shows how depression is linked to a repetition of the same thing, while the melancholy opens up for eros, that which transcends yourself.
No matter how you look at the case is at least Agony of Eros a far more interesting essay than In the Swarm. Strange, a bit enigmatic – yes, simply less predictable and with a large dose otherness, to use Chul-Hans' favorite words in the essay.
